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  • ohnomorelemmytoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlA Judicial "Trolley Problem"
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    1 year ago

    The entire point of these problems is that they serve as an intuition pump for what people are morally prepared to do.

    If the scenario doesn’t make sense, people will respond to it in unpredictable ways.

    In the real world, if I push a fat man in front of a train it won’t slow the train down and save the lives of five people people further down on the tracks, it’ll just kill six people and I’ll be a murderer.

    So when we find that people are more uncomfortable with pushing someone under a train vs throwing a switch to make the train hit them, does that mean that they instinctively don’t trust the premise and think maybe that they’ve killed someone for no reason, or that they prefer the extra layer of indirection. We don’t know, and this really reduces the value of the thought experiments.